Wednesday, May 18, 2011

Watch Corbally's Kuay Team

In a drawing featured on the front sports page of the Seattle Daily Times for April 13, 1924, staff illustrator Parker McCallister shows his mastery of caricature and portaiture. The Kuays were the team from Queen Anne High School in Seattle, later to be named the Grizzlies. Queen Anne would produce one of Seattle's greatest baseball luminaries, Edo Vanni, in the 1930s. Vanni graduated from Queen Anne and went to the University of Washington for one year before quitting to play for the Seattle Rainiers. At the same time, Hank Ketchum graduated from Queen Anne, was a Husky for one year, and then quit to go south, eventually creating Dennis the Menace, but I digress...for in 1924, he was only six. The Kuay team of 1924 was coached by John E. Corbally. Corbally also coached at Broadway High School, and by 1927 would leave the coaching ranks to become superintendent/principal of schools in South Bend, Pacific County, Washington (he had moved to Seattle from there, his son being born in South Bend in 1924). Corbally would be in South Bend long enough for Pat Paulsen to be born, but he may not have known that, nor may have Paulsen. Corbally ended up going back to the UW, eventually rising to Associate Dean of the College of Education. One of his sons, the one born in 1924, the year of our concern, also John E. Corbally, would resign as President of the University of Illinois system in 1979 to become President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The younger Corbally would transform the MacArthur Foundation during its first decade into one of the premier genius granting money dispensers in the world. Interestingly, the younger Corbally resigned at the same time as the Illinois Urbana-Champaign Chancellor working underneath him, William Gerberding. Gerberding would transform the University of Washington through a focus on the medical school, sciences, and growing an endowment, among other things. By the time he left, each was a national powerhouse, similar to the football team he decimated by not standing up for Don James. Perhaps, these are just observations, not statements of fact. I, knownothings. He says he tried, maybe he did. Parker McAllister was a staff illustrator at the Seattle Times for 30 years, working from 1924-1965. He was born in Massachusetts in 1903, and died in Arizona in 1970. This drawing is one of the first he did for the Times, maybe the first, not quite sure about that. McAllister painted more than 1,000 covers for the weekly Seattle Times Magazine, mostly concentrating in the later years, after World War II, on historical scenes. At that time, the Seattle Daily Times was one of the first papers to employ regular color sections and covers. These were done in four-color process, with McAllister preparing his own plates from photographs he would take at various locations around the state of Washington. These images were combined with content from staff writer Lucile McDonald, who was a groundbreaking journalist/historian. She wrote 20 or more books, but a good one to start with is her own story. The reproductions of McAllister watercolors and oils were meant to highlight Washington on the 100th anniversary of becoming a territory. Eventually, the series was called "100 Years Ago" and grew to cover nearly every square inch of the State, with some being combined into a book called "Washington's Yesterdays". More to come on McAllister's artwork. He was a master and deserves greater recognition.

About Me

Seattle Mariners fan and member of the Society for American Baseball Research. This site is dedicated to exploring, from a somewhat obtuse angle, the geometry of baseball's cultural influence (ambiguity intentional).